Traditional computer data centers are based around the server as the fundamental unit of computing. Each server typically includes its own dedicated computing resources including processors, memory, disk storage, and networking hardware and software. Individual servers may be stacked together with high density into racks, and multiple racks may be arranged in a data center.
Some current datacenter technologies aim to disaggregate computing resources. In particular, rack-scale architecture recasts the computing rack as the fundamental unit of computing for large datacenters. Each rack may include collections of pooled compute nodes, pooled memory, and pooled storage. By disaggregating and pooling computing resources, rack-scale architecture may improve the flexibility and scalability of datacenters, for example by allowing computing resources (e.g., compute nodes and/or memory) to be dynamically added and/or partitioned among workloads. Additionally, rack-scale architecture may improve data center thermal management and power consumption, which may in turn improve compute density, performance, and efficiency.